Friday, April 03, 2015

1. During bath time, I took a toy away from Little Man, who was using it to throw water across the room, despite my repeatedly saying, "No!" when he did it. He began crying, of course. Then the sweetest thing unfolded before my eyes...

Pumpkin kissed him, and showed him the right way to play in the tub. He seemed to understand, and had a good time after that, without causing any more trouble.

"I passed out or
collapsed," said [Matt] Bixley, 42, a quantitative geneticist with New
Zealand's AgResearch. "Something happened. It wasn't sleepiness. I
don't know. I spent some time thinking about what that might mean and
where I was going. It was a boundary I wasn't prepared to cross, and I
quit."

The race, which another participant said, requires
one "to be comfortable being inside your own head", has seen only 14
of 1000 participants complete it since its inception in 1986.

3. I'm not sure I agree with his analysis,
but I do agree with Jon Pittman that something is going on. In "The
Tyranny of the Minimum Viable Product", he notes
some ... interesting ... behavior on the part of some of the gadgets he
owns:

I have a popular "smart home" system to control lights, monitor doors, and generally keep an eye on things. A central function of the system is to turn lights on and off at specified times or at events such as sunset and sunrise. The system randomly misses times and events. And, when my network fails, so does the hub.

I can't help but wonder whether such
oversights are part of
a larger problem. That said, I am grateful
for people like the author for finding such problems in new products.

4. Over at the Onion is
a near-perfect send-up of the environmentalist movement, which
it reports
is becoming concerned about preserving Mars:

Activist
leaders told reporters that within the year they also hope to propose
several health codes that will prohibit the dumping of hazardous
materials into the planet's underground lava tubes and clean up much
of the existing industrial and electronic waste that has already
accumulated on the Martian surface.

It's too bad that this
piece on the Redder Tomorrow Foundation appeared when and where it
did: It would have been great for April Fool's Day.

So the greens will now be called reds? Seems appropriate. They're already half-way there.

BTW, about that race; 60 hours to complete 100 miles is 36 minutes per mile which is about half as fast as a walking pace at 20 min/mile. Let’s say you walk 20 min/mile = 33.33 hours for the course. Is it really that impossible to walk at a normal pace for 33 hours? Add an hour or two to rest or take a nap or even if you take 8 hours to sleep you’re still well on track to finish on time.

Yeah, but this is in wilderness and, IIRC, covers the height of Mt. Everest twice per lap. And at several points (each lap?), you have to find a book and tear a page from it as proof that you completed that part of the course.